Simon Bent's play Prick Up Your Ears is the most recent in a line of revivals and biographies that would appal Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. Its perspective on them illustrates exactly how the British theatre still fails to do the men or their work justice.

For a start, Bent casts Halliwell as a sexless, soiled middle-class loser; Orton as a brilliant, ruthless, social-climbing working-class winner. Then there's the dialogue Bent gives their neighbour Mrs Corden, so straightforwardly comic that the West End Whingers observed: "Some of her lines sound as much like Alan Bennett or Victoria Wood as Orton … Are they all basically the same person?" Orton would likely be horrified by the thought.

He would be similarly unimpressed by mediocre revivals of his work – David Grindley's What the Butler Saw for example – that emphasise the comic surface of his writing at the expense of the violent dangers beneath. Orton begged in a letter to Loot's producer that the play be "nearer The Homecoming than I Love Lucy", and asked in his diary for a Sloane who is "very young (...) someone you'd like to fuck silly". Even now, most productions fight shy of being so confrontational. Recently we've been served up Neil Stuke, 34, and Mathew Horne, 30.

Orton's relationship with Kenneth Halliwell has been similarly neutered. The best portrait of their marriage is in Simon Shepherd's neglected Because We're Queers (1989), an antidote to Lahr's biography Prick Up Your Ears and its by-products which, Shepherd observes, fail to relate their lives to a "society (…) deeply hostile to homosexuality". As Shepherd shows, the handsome, experienced, older Halliwell taught Orton much about life, literature and picking up men. They lived a guiltless, sexually open existence at a time when society saw homosexuality as a crime, and sex outside marriage as a sin. On one telling occasion in his diary, Orton writes about preferring sex in a public lavatory to the opening-night bash of Crimes of Passion, which had been poorly produced at the Royal Court in June 1967.

Just as importantly, Orton and Halliwell waged a two-man war against the suffocating hypocrisies of 1950s Britain via outrageous literary fictions. They were a two-man terrorist cell, their weapons words and sexual excess. Bent's play is symptomatic of a type of theatre that, often unable to stage the plays with the right edge, also fails to show the two men as radical collaborators in work and love. Our society remains bound by the idea that anything other than monogamy must be damaging. Few of Orton's interpreters seem to understand the two men's profound contempt for Britain's hypocrisy, class divisions and fear of sex. Their achievement remains somehow beyond our comprehension.